In my local paper this morning there is an article by Phillip Taubman of the New York Times News Service. It’s titled “Pentagon frets as engineers shun military.” The sub-title reads “A lack of skilled personnel fuels cost overruns and missteps in high tech projects.”

The article notes that “even as spending on new military projects has reached the highest level since the Reagan years, the Pentagon has increasingly been losing the people most skilled at managing them.” The article blames this as a major reason for the current rash of overruns.

In the Air Force, according to the article, the number of civilian and uniformed engineers on the core acquisition staff has fallen 35 to 40 percent over the last 14 years. This in the face of Pentagon plans to spend $900 billion on development and procurement in the next five years, including $335 billion on major new systems. Quite a brain drain.

The article reports that Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that cost overruns on military projects have “reached crisis proportions.” He has called for creation of an internal Pentagon office to oversee costs (does that mean that nobody is overseeing them now?). Further reported is that a recent GAO study of 95 military projects worth $1.6 trillion reported cost overruns of $295 billion, or 40 percent, and an average delay of 21 months. Getting much of the blame is deficient engineering management. (Forty percent? The average used to be around 30%)

According to the article, a retired guy named Dr. Paul G. Kaminski is leading a high level task force, visiting university campuses and military contractors, to push for better engineering management. His task force was organized by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Engineering. It is working with something called the Air Force Studies Board.

A report from Kaminski’s group scolds the Air Force for “haphazardly handling, or simply ignoring, several basic systems engineering steps.”

• Considering alternative concepts before plunging ahead with a program
• Setting clear performance goals for a new system
• Analyzing interactions between technologies

Here are some program-specific criticisms:

• In a satellite system designed to detect foreign missile launches, the design calls for two sensors that cannot operate simultaneously on the same spacecraft without expensive, costly shielding to prevent electromagnetic interference from one disabling the other
• In Future Combat Systems, development was begun before performance requirements were resolved
• The Pentagon started building a complex network of communications satellites without a coherent plan for integration with an existing system or a consistent set of requirements to accommodate the needs of the four military services.
May I offer some comments on all of this?

Those sold on Monte Carlo type techniques even with correlation cannot begin to deal with a general failure of this magnitude, even if anyone could estimate correlations properly, which they cannot.

It’s time to quit playing Monte Carlo and correlation math games and get down to serious cause and effect analysis.